It's sold as an update to existing computers. The $130 price tag is subsidized from the sale they've already made in selling you a computer. Since it's not license to be installed on any other computer, it's clear that this is a product that they're only offering in a subsidized "upgrade" version.
The only argument you might possibly have is if you think that they're being deceptive by not explicitly marking it as an "upgrade". If you went out and bought it thinking you were permitted to install it on any computer, weren't able to, and Apple wouldn't let you return the product, then you might have some kind of case for "deceptive practices or something". However, I believe copyright law allows Apple to say, "this is only licensed to run on Apple computers," and if so, then Psystar is violating their copyright.
IANAL, but I think people are wrong to think it's an issue of the EULA. A EULA could theoretically give Psystar the right to sell OSX pre-installed, but it doesn't.
Without a EULA at all, they simply don't have the right to do what they're doing. They're buying 1 copy of OSX, modifying it, and then selling the original copy plus a modified copy for the price of the original copy. This is simply copyright infringement.
Imagine if Cisco sold routers with Linux pre-installed, but it was a modified version of Linux and they weren't releasing the source of the modifications. That would be blatant copyright infringement.
And here's an important distinction to understand: it's not copyright infringement simply because Linux is released under the GPL and the GPL doesn't permit it. The problem is that you can't distribute modified copies of software like that without a license. The GPL is what normally permits redistribution of software released under the GPL, but since the GPL doesn't permit this, it's simply distribution without a license to do so. That's the way in which the GPL uses copyright law.
So in this case, Apple has not given any license for this sort of redistribution. They don't need to argue that the EULA doesn't allow it, but rather Psystar needs to argue that they should be allowed to do this without a license.
If you're a lawyer and I'm wrong, correct me. But I know if someone were violating Debian's copyright by shipping closed-source derivatives, people on/. would be freaking out.
time for a REAL relief package that rewards the RESPONSIBLE people who wound up with overpriced homes because of the 40% people who were dishonestly in the market driving the prices up rather than bailing out the irresponsible asshats and leaving the RESPONSIBLE people holding the bag.
It's really very easy to say, "Screw all these people. They're irresponsible and did the wrong thing. Let's go ahead and punish them!" And there's a part of me that even agrees, but there's something that sometimes gets missed: you might be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Regardless of whether or not everyone did the "right" or "responsible" thing, tossing enormous numbers of people out of their homes and closing up banks might be a sort of justice, but it won't simply help the people who were responsible either. Responsible people's house values are going to go into the toilet, too. Responsible people are going to lose their jobs, too. If you just let the economy collapse (if you accept that it would collapse) is going to hurt everyone.
And what was the horrible crime committed by all these "irresponsible people"? Mostly, it's that when someone put out a sign that said, "FREE MONEY!!!" they showed up and took some. It may have been stupid, but it's only worth so much to assign blame. The bigger question is, "What are you going to do about it now?"
Now you're talking about a lot of things, ascribing views to me that I don't hold. I'm not going to respond to all of them. First, I'm not going to just "trust you" because you work in education. I know lots of people who work in education, and they don't all agree, so clearly there's room for some debate. It's all well and good to say, "parents should be involved", but how are you going to make that happen? It's great to say, "the government should make HMOs work right!" but that's not really a solution. What you're saying is, "We shouldn't spend money, we should just solve these problems!" and your view on how to solve these problems seems to be "Solve them!" The fact is, some of these things are going to cost some money.
I'm not saying "throw money at it", I'm saying it will probably cost money. Education needs to be completely overhauled. Our views of education need to be changed. The question is, how are we going to do that, and what pieces can be done at the federal level. Likewise, Internet needs to be treated like real infrastructure, and not like a luxury entertainment service. There's a question as to what role the federal government can have, but it should have a role and it will cost some money.
I'm not saying this bill is perfect or even good. In fact, it's not what I'd like to see. On the other hand, grandstanding now just so you can say "told you so" later isn't really helping. They aren't offering real suggestions, but reverting to, "Let's give more tax cuts! Always tax cuts! (as thought that's been working) Infrastructure is communist, people are spoiled by having food stamps, and if the government does anything in education, then they're just 'throwing money at it'! More tax cuts paired with talk of cutting spending, but no actual suggestions to cut spending!" It's basically pointless stonewalling for the purpose of winning some elections the next time around.
Ultimately, the New Deal did very little economically speaking prior to WW2. The mass of government spending ramping up the war effort DID accelerate recovery.
There are a lot of economists and historians who would disagree with you, so I wouldn't assert that so boldly as fact. Plus, part of the reason why WW2 did help the economy was because we built factories and infrastructure for the war effort that later became useful for civilian purposes. Now reconsider my thought experiment for a second: If everything else were the same, but WW2 never happened, could the government had geared up government spending, building the same number of guns and planes and tanks, and gotten the
Now, tax cuts - in a normal economic environment - do stimulate the economy.
Yes, and they can often be a very quick stimulus, but they aren't necessarily the best stimulus. Lots of people believe (from what I've heard and read) that some kinds of spending can do better (you hear about the "multiplier").
The trick is to get the tax rate to where it needs to be to support necessary services and, yes, cut the programs that are either (a) not working or (b) unnecessary.
I think most people would agree with that, but the question that tends to be a sticking point is "what's 'working' and what's 'unnecessary'?"
The problem in this economy is not tax cuts. The problem is that there is a massive amount of bad and unsustainable debt, due to incredibly poor education
If the problem is poor education (at least in part) then might it make sense to have some kind funding for education? I mean, you can talk about how you want to target those funds, what kind of education should be focused on, etc., but some kind of education funding might make sense?
[I've been] doing things the responsible way, living within my means, and my tax rate is going to be jacked up to pay for an "economic stimulus"
Yeah, and what some people seem to miss is that even if they don't technically "jack up" your taxes, the government will be spending money they don't have, which will eventually lead to inflation, which will make your savings worth less. Inflation is, in a lot of ways, a different sort of tax. Nothing is free.
I agree with many things you're saying, but the one thing that I think is missing is that lots of valid programs (particularly infrastructure) really have been neglected for the past several decades. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, and our Internet infrastructure is sub-par. Also, our education system is in the shitter, partially because of an attitude that education is a personal investment or a privilege for the rich (or at least well-off) rather than something that benefits our society at large. (having a poorly educated citizenry in a democracy is a huge problem.) On top of that, our healthcare system really is in bad shape.
So what I'm saying is that there are lots of programs that pretty validly need funding, and had been neglected. I heard one of the things Republicans focused on cutting was food stamps-- as though $3 a day is too extravagant a food budget. I wouldn't mind if Republicans were asking for sensible things to be dropped from the bill, but as it is, it seems like they're just picking a fight. They know that if they go along with the bill and it succeeds, the most they'll get credit for is "going along with Obama's plan", and if it fails they'll have to share the blame. However, if they fight it, there's no great danger that it will be so wildly successful that they can't argue "we didn't vote for it because it should have been better".
And meanwhile Republicans are on the floor claiming that the New Deal didn't help the Great Depression at all, but rather it was WW2 that fixed the economy. First of all, that's far from a universally accepted idea, but even if it were, what does that mean our solution should be? Start WW3? Great idea. Or you could just spend the same amount of money you would spend on a war building tanks, and then not have the war and have the same effect. *Or* you could go ahead and spend that money on something more useful, like... I don't know... Broadband Internet. You get all the stimulus of WW2, but the money gets spent on something useful rather than machinery that gets destroyed by war.
Not that I'm aware of. I'm guessing it would be pretty hard, and the people capable of doing it are more likely to focus on WINE, which incidentally I believe can be used to run the Windows version of Photoshop.
It takes more than a kernel to run an application. For example, you're not going to be able to run OpenOffice on Linux without some implementation of X11.
So Apple has something else instead of X11, and you can't run Photoshop without that. That thing is proprietary.
It seems to me that a lot of your issues might just be cultural issues. For example, if you do have an "eternal undo" and don't want to pass that along, get people into the culture of exporting the file to something else when they want to send it to someone. The problem already happens, with metadata and tracking information being passed along, but people don't think about it because it's not their experience that these things get saved. If the undo was always saved, maybe people would think more about what metadata is being passed along, and actually think to export the file (or whatever clears the metadata) before they send it out.
Some of your other problems may have trade-offs. For example, it is easier to revert to an earlier version of your file when the cat runs across the keyboard if you've saved it right before you left the keyboard. But what about the case where you haven't saved it recently? Then having to hit "save" hasn't really made the cat problem any better. On the other hand, I suspect that it's much more common that people accidentally close things and forget to save them. So you lose something, but you get something too.
Or this one:
Imagine this sequence of commands: I type a long document, decide I didn't like the last changes, undo too much, and then press a single letter. Does in this moment the undo history become a tree, or do I lose the ability to redo the excessive undo?
Again, you have that same problem with "undo" in general, and your main point is, what if I want to go back to what the document was like an hour ago, but the undo (for whatever reason) isn't letting me do that. I would assume that part of the idea is to keep system snapshots so that you can still retrieve documents in a prior state. If that's not the case, it should be.
It's a problem, but not an insurmountable one. In fact, this happens already, and proprietary companies deal with it. There's a lot of commonality between distributions, and have been attempts to standardize certain things. In the worst case scenario, developers will have to create packages for different distributions, which doesn't seem all that impossibly hard under most circumstances. And like I said, this already happens.
But I think that if Linux gets to be big enough, one of two things will happen. Either most companies will offer their software under some kind of open source license sufficient to allow people to port the software in a pinch, or else enough of a standard base will be established. It may be some official standard or a de facto standard, but there will be some set of libraries/tools/applications that developers will pretty well be able to assume are present on most Linux distributions.
Yeah, I think often when people use the term "operating system", they're talking about everything that gets installed by default from a particular vendor-- or something like that. So when you stick an Ubuntu disk in and do a default installation, everything you get is "part of the operating system". Some might even go as far as to say it includes everything that can be installed through the default package servers.
But if you really want to get into it, it can be a little bit more subtle than that. For example, if HP builds on top of Ubuntu but changes some of the packages, is it still Ubuntu? What HP completely rewrote Gnome and X.org, but their Gnome/X.org replacements are GPL and maintain full application compatibility with Ubuntu? Is it still Ubuntu then? Does it change the situation if HP wrote a proprietary replacement for Gnome/X.org, but still maintained application compatibility? Would it still be Ubuntu? Would it still be Linux?
I don't think those questions are all that easy to answer. Whether they could keep the Ubuntu branding would largely be a legal issue of whether Canonical allowed it. If HP tried to replace X.org with something proprietary, whether or not it's still "Linux" (or legal), you'd have a lot of pissed off people.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to me to see, if a lot of OEMs start shipping with Linux, exactly how much customization they do. Realistically, they could just work with a given distribution to make sure their hardware is well-supported, and then install the normal/vanilla install of that distribution, but they could also effectively roll their own distro. It could get interesting (but unfortunately probably won't).
Yeah, I've sort of been waiting for this. It makes a lot of sense to me that OEMs would want their pre-installed OS to be something that they could control completely, even if they don't technically "own" it.
Once upon a time, every computer company came out with their own hardware and software package. You had Apple, IBM, Commodore, etc. Some of the reason that everyone came out with their own software was because they weren't allowed to just take each others' software, but some of it was also that they each had different ideas about what was important.
That model fell apart because it was too expensive for everyone to develop everything themselves from scratch, and also because it was too annoying to deal with all the incompatibilities. However, by turning to Microsoft as an alternate solution, everyone sacrificed a lot of power and control over their own products.
Now that there are credible FOSS operating systems just sitting around waiting to be used, the problems of "starting from scratch" and "dealing with incompatibilities" are pretty much gone. If I were running Dell or HP, I would have had people working on custom/rebranded Linux or BSD distributions for several years already, including packaging systems and servers that would allow my company to control updates too.
I'm surprised more companies haven't done this, actually.
It's not that surprising when you consider that Microsoft has made a practice or retaliating against OEMs who sell non-MS systems. I don't have good citations here, but I remember reading that Microsoft used to put things in their deals like, "If you advertise or openly sell non-MS desktop systems, we'll raise the cost of your OEM versions of Windows $X per copy." Even if X is a pretty small number, it can add up to be a lot of money for big OEMs.
Apple is a bit different in that they have a proprietary OS that they license only for specific hardware (isn't that still the way it is? or no? I could be behind the times here).
Not exactly-- really it depends a bit on what you consider the "OS" to be. The underlying OS is open source, and "free" in the FSF sense. The graphical layer that runs on top is proprietary and only licensed to be installed on Apple hardware. You can take their OS and replace the graphical layer with X11 and Gnome, and the whole thing runs.
Now a lot of people would say this is splitting hairs, saying that since you can't run OSX apps on a "free" system, you can't say the OS in "free". It's a valid objection. However, I still think it's noteworthy that code for the kernel and lots of other stuff is available to developer to look at and copy.
I also just generally dislike the "I'm cool, I have an Apple. I'm artsy. PC users automatically get -5 points for using a PC even if their [music, art, web design] is great."
Me too, I guess, insofar as there are Apple users who act that way. I don't let it stop me from using a Mac when it happens to be the best tool for the job (which sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't). Also, lots of Mac users aren't really like that. A fair amount these days are normal computer geeks who just happen to want a Unix system that is also formally supported by Photoshop (or some similar needs).
I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency unless you're doing things that *I* might find common, which is not Joe User.
I can believe that a properly engineered OS would prompt that frequently, assuming enough improperly engineered applications. And there are plenty of crappy Windows apps floating out there to make this thing believable.
It's my business where I install the OS. It will only be on one computer at a time, but if I pay the money, the OS goes where I decide when it suits me to reinstall, without a penalty to ME.
I agree completely. I always get modded as a troll, but forced activation really is one of the things that keeps me from using Windows Vista. Every product that I've used that has activation has, at some point or another, made it needlessly difficult for me to do something legitimate. I just refuse to deal with that stuff anymore.
I have enough problems with software working properly without the developers embedding kill-switches in their software.
Oh, it's terrible for consumers. First, not auctioning off this spectrum deprives tax payers of money. When you think about it, it's really criminal that the government doesn't auction off all of our services and rights to private enterprise. We could make SO MUCH money!
Also, by providing "free" things, you're depriving companies of revenue, which will damage the economy. They'll have to charge more for other services, and probably cut jobs too. We want the telecoms to make as much money as possible, because then the economy will thrive.
(Of course I'm not serious, but apparently some people think like this.)
Here's what kind of annoys me, though: why should I have to install add-ons to remove functionality that I don't ever really want?
Honestly, there might be one or two websites that I use that use pop-up windows for valid reasons, but I'm sure that if that avenue were shut to them, they could easily make the page work without pop-ups. Why can't browsers just not allow a web page to open a new window? Or if you must, make it so new windows can only be opened in response to an actual click, only allow one window to be opened by that click, and make it so that one click can't also change the contents of the existing window in addition to opening a new window.
I just don't see lots of valid uses for letting scripts open windows in the first place.
Yeah, I acknowledge that my concern shouldn't really be the primary concern. There's a reason I wanted to call it a "weird" objection.
I just think it is possible to put too much faith in peer review, given that the "peers" reviewing it are also human beings, just as fallible as other human beings. Computers are arguably less fallible in other ways, but of course they can't really make judgements. So I'm just really trying to point out that, in the other cases where we mix fallible human beings with machine judgement, we tend to get very powerful systems that can work well in some ways, but we also tend to end up with important things getting lost in the shuffle.
I used the example of a spam filter. My Gmail spam filter still lets some spam through, and gets occasional false-positives. Still, I use it, and I'd hate to have to filter through all that spam myself.
I'm sometimes bothered by the stress on studies being "verified" by something like a peer-review process. Not that I don't understand why it makes sense. It's a pretty reasonable attempt to sort valid work from crap, but...
There's still a certain way in which it's just an appeal to authority. It's people saying, "We should accept what this scientist says because other scientists say that he's right." I guess what I'm saying is that I worry that, as a process like this becomes more technical, people will be more likely to confuse a statement like, "This study has been reviewed by other scientists and seems to have merit," with something more like, "This study is correct, infallible, and indisputable."
And I guess part of the reason I worry about this is that there may be cases where what "everyone thinks" (i.e. the common conception even among experts) is wrong, and some random nutcase is right. It almost never happens, but it happens sometimes. It seems to me that a technical method of assigning trustworthiness of ideas in a web of trust might possibly lead to having all the groundbreaking ideas go into a spam filter somewhere, never to be seen again.
I didn't LOL, but maybe it's just because I've been reading Internet posts too much. After a while, you realize that you can't assume anything is a joke, no matter how absurd.
So to rephrase your analogy as I see the situation, it would be if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then at the dealership they stripped off the leather and replaced it with canvas (or whatever), and put in a crappy stereo using the excuse that only audiophiles really need nice stereos.
I think the analogy has to get weirder than that. It would be like if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then hacked the stereos to limit the volume to a low level and put some device on the engine that wouldn't let you go over 35mph, and sell that for a cheaper price.
You could easily argue that Nissan has the right to do that, but it would seem silly, and I'd expect consumers to either refuse to buy them, or else buy them and then hack them to make the cars fully functional.
Yeah, as a Linux user, it's nice not to have things so complicated. I only have to choose between Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, and-
In every story I've seen about Microsoft releasing tons of versions of Windows, there are always comments that amount to, "Yeah, but there are tons of different Linux distributions!"
The problem with this criticism is that it's not at all the same thing. Each Linux distribution is an entirely different company (or group) putting out their own operating system. These operating systems are competitors. If you ignore the fact that they're all based on the same kernel, they're just different vendors selling different operating systems.
So what are you trying to criticize here? Are you trying to criticize Redhat because Canonical released Ubuntu?
The Microsoft situation is that it's one vendor selling several different versions of the same operating system. Whether or not you think that's a good thing, it's a single company releasing multiple subtly different products for the purpose of market segmentation, as opposed to multiple companies releasing competing products.
I might be prone to hyperbole, but I don't think that particular post is actually exaggerated. I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was leaked somewhere around 2000 that Apple was working on a phone, which is why there were constant rumors for years that it was slated for immanent release. Jobs later confirmed that they'd been working on it for a long time, but didn't want to release it until the technology got good enough.
So no, it was definitely not some product that was thrown together hastily in a short amount of time. As far as iChat, I also disagree there. When they first added video capabilities, I could almost never get a connection. In the most recent versions, though, it seems to work great. If someone has a slow uplink, the picture might look pretty bad, but it generally works.
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I wonder if this means Cisco can install a modified version of Debian on their routers without adhering to the GPL.
It's sold as an update to existing computers. The $130 price tag is subsidized from the sale they've already made in selling you a computer. Since it's not license to be installed on any other computer, it's clear that this is a product that they're only offering in a subsidized "upgrade" version.
The only argument you might possibly have is if you think that they're being deceptive by not explicitly marking it as an "upgrade". If you went out and bought it thinking you were permitted to install it on any computer, weren't able to, and Apple wouldn't let you return the product, then you might have some kind of case for "deceptive practices or something". However, I believe copyright law allows Apple to say, "this is only licensed to run on Apple computers," and if so, then Psystar is violating their copyright.
IANAL, but I think people are wrong to think it's an issue of the EULA. A EULA could theoretically give Psystar the right to sell OSX pre-installed, but it doesn't.
Without a EULA at all, they simply don't have the right to do what they're doing. They're buying 1 copy of OSX, modifying it, and then selling the original copy plus a modified copy for the price of the original copy. This is simply copyright infringement.
Imagine if Cisco sold routers with Linux pre-installed, but it was a modified version of Linux and they weren't releasing the source of the modifications. That would be blatant copyright infringement.
And here's an important distinction to understand: it's not copyright infringement simply because Linux is released under the GPL and the GPL doesn't permit it. The problem is that you can't distribute modified copies of software like that without a license. The GPL is what normally permits redistribution of software released under the GPL, but since the GPL doesn't permit this, it's simply distribution without a license to do so. That's the way in which the GPL uses copyright law.
So in this case, Apple has not given any license for this sort of redistribution. They don't need to argue that the EULA doesn't allow it, but rather Psystar needs to argue that they should be allowed to do this without a license.
If you're a lawyer and I'm wrong, correct me. But I know if someone were violating Debian's copyright by shipping closed-source derivatives, people on /. would be freaking out.
time for a REAL relief package that rewards the RESPONSIBLE people who wound up with overpriced homes because of the 40% people who were dishonestly in the market driving the prices up rather than bailing out the irresponsible asshats and leaving the RESPONSIBLE people holding the bag.
It's really very easy to say, "Screw all these people. They're irresponsible and did the wrong thing. Let's go ahead and punish them!" And there's a part of me that even agrees, but there's something that sometimes gets missed: you might be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Regardless of whether or not everyone did the "right" or "responsible" thing, tossing enormous numbers of people out of their homes and closing up banks might be a sort of justice, but it won't simply help the people who were responsible either. Responsible people's house values are going to go into the toilet, too. Responsible people are going to lose their jobs, too. If you just let the economy collapse (if you accept that it would collapse) is going to hurt everyone.
And what was the horrible crime committed by all these "irresponsible people"? Mostly, it's that when someone put out a sign that said, "FREE MONEY!!!" they showed up and took some. It may have been stupid, but it's only worth so much to assign blame. The bigger question is, "What are you going to do about it now?"
Now you're talking about a lot of things, ascribing views to me that I don't hold. I'm not going to respond to all of them. First, I'm not going to just "trust you" because you work in education. I know lots of people who work in education, and they don't all agree, so clearly there's room for some debate. It's all well and good to say, "parents should be involved", but how are you going to make that happen? It's great to say, "the government should make HMOs work right!" but that's not really a solution. What you're saying is, "We shouldn't spend money, we should just solve these problems!" and your view on how to solve these problems seems to be "Solve them!" The fact is, some of these things are going to cost some money.
I'm not saying "throw money at it", I'm saying it will probably cost money. Education needs to be completely overhauled. Our views of education need to be changed. The question is, how are we going to do that, and what pieces can be done at the federal level. Likewise, Internet needs to be treated like real infrastructure, and not like a luxury entertainment service. There's a question as to what role the federal government can have, but it should have a role and it will cost some money.
I'm not saying this bill is perfect or even good. In fact, it's not what I'd like to see. On the other hand, grandstanding now just so you can say "told you so" later isn't really helping. They aren't offering real suggestions, but reverting to, "Let's give more tax cuts! Always tax cuts! (as thought that's been working) Infrastructure is communist, people are spoiled by having food stamps, and if the government does anything in education, then they're just 'throwing money at it'! More tax cuts paired with talk of cutting spending, but no actual suggestions to cut spending!" It's basically pointless stonewalling for the purpose of winning some elections the next time around.
Ultimately, the New Deal did very little economically speaking prior to WW2. The mass of government spending ramping up the war effort DID accelerate recovery.
There are a lot of economists and historians who would disagree with you, so I wouldn't assert that so boldly as fact. Plus, part of the reason why WW2 did help the economy was because we built factories and infrastructure for the war effort that later became useful for civilian purposes. Now reconsider my thought experiment for a second: If everything else were the same, but WW2 never happened, could the government had geared up government spending, building the same number of guns and planes and tanks, and gotten the
Now, tax cuts - in a normal economic environment - do stimulate the economy.
Yes, and they can often be a very quick stimulus, but they aren't necessarily the best stimulus. Lots of people believe (from what I've heard and read) that some kinds of spending can do better (you hear about the "multiplier").
The trick is to get the tax rate to where it needs to be to support necessary services and, yes, cut the programs that are either (a) not working or (b) unnecessary.
I think most people would agree with that, but the question that tends to be a sticking point is "what's 'working' and what's 'unnecessary'?"
The problem in this economy is not tax cuts. The problem is that there is a massive amount of bad and unsustainable debt, due to incredibly poor education
If the problem is poor education (at least in part) then might it make sense to have some kind funding for education? I mean, you can talk about how you want to target those funds, what kind of education should be focused on, etc., but some kind of education funding might make sense?
[I've been] doing things the responsible way, living within my means, and my tax rate is going to be jacked up to pay for an "economic stimulus"
Yeah, and what some people seem to miss is that even if they don't technically "jack up" your taxes, the government will be spending money they don't have, which will eventually lead to inflation, which will make your savings worth less. Inflation is, in a lot of ways, a different sort of tax. Nothing is free.
I agree with many things you're saying, but the one thing that I think is missing is that lots of valid programs (particularly infrastructure) really have been neglected for the past several decades. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, and our Internet infrastructure is sub-par. Also, our education system is in the shitter, partially because of an attitude that education is a personal investment or a privilege for the rich (or at least well-off) rather than something that benefits our society at large. (having a poorly educated citizenry in a democracy is a huge problem.) On top of that, our healthcare system really is in bad shape.
So what I'm saying is that there are lots of programs that pretty validly need funding, and had been neglected. I heard one of the things Republicans focused on cutting was food stamps-- as though $3 a day is too extravagant a food budget. I wouldn't mind if Republicans were asking for sensible things to be dropped from the bill, but as it is, it seems like they're just picking a fight. They know that if they go along with the bill and it succeeds, the most they'll get credit for is "going along with Obama's plan", and if it fails they'll have to share the blame. However, if they fight it, there's no great danger that it will be so wildly successful that they can't argue "we didn't vote for it because it should have been better".
And meanwhile Republicans are on the floor claiming that the New Deal didn't help the Great Depression at all, but rather it was WW2 that fixed the economy. First of all, that's far from a universally accepted idea, but even if it were, what does that mean our solution should be? Start WW3? Great idea. Or you could just spend the same amount of money you would spend on a war building tanks, and then not have the war and have the same effect. *Or* you could go ahead and spend that money on something more useful, like... I don't know... Broadband Internet. You get all the stimulus of WW2, but the money gets spent on something useful rather than machinery that gets destroyed by war.
I guess some of that depends on whether you think 7.6% is the bottom, or the beginning of a death spiral.
Not that I'm aware of. I'm guessing it would be pretty hard, and the people capable of doing it are more likely to focus on WINE, which incidentally I believe can be used to run the Windows version of Photoshop.
It takes more than a kernel to run an application. For example, you're not going to be able to run OpenOffice on Linux without some implementation of X11.
So Apple has something else instead of X11, and you can't run Photoshop without that. That thing is proprietary.
It seems to me that a lot of your issues might just be cultural issues. For example, if you do have an "eternal undo" and don't want to pass that along, get people into the culture of exporting the file to something else when they want to send it to someone. The problem already happens, with metadata and tracking information being passed along, but people don't think about it because it's not their experience that these things get saved. If the undo was always saved, maybe people would think more about what metadata is being passed along, and actually think to export the file (or whatever clears the metadata) before they send it out.
Some of your other problems may have trade-offs. For example, it is easier to revert to an earlier version of your file when the cat runs across the keyboard if you've saved it right before you left the keyboard. But what about the case where you haven't saved it recently? Then having to hit "save" hasn't really made the cat problem any better. On the other hand, I suspect that it's much more common that people accidentally close things and forget to save them. So you lose something, but you get something too.
Or this one:
Imagine this sequence of commands: I type a long document, decide I didn't like the last changes, undo too much, and then press a single letter. Does in this moment the undo history become a tree, or do I lose the ability to redo the excessive undo?
Again, you have that same problem with "undo" in general, and your main point is, what if I want to go back to what the document was like an hour ago, but the undo (for whatever reason) isn't letting me do that. I would assume that part of the idea is to keep system snapshots so that you can still retrieve documents in a prior state. If that's not the case, it should be.
It's a problem, but not an insurmountable one. In fact, this happens already, and proprietary companies deal with it. There's a lot of commonality between distributions, and have been attempts to standardize certain things. In the worst case scenario, developers will have to create packages for different distributions, which doesn't seem all that impossibly hard under most circumstances. And like I said, this already happens.
But I think that if Linux gets to be big enough, one of two things will happen. Either most companies will offer their software under some kind of open source license sufficient to allow people to port the software in a pinch, or else enough of a standard base will be established. It may be some official standard or a de facto standard, but there will be some set of libraries/tools/applications that developers will pretty well be able to assume are present on most Linux distributions.
Yeah, I think often when people use the term "operating system", they're talking about everything that gets installed by default from a particular vendor-- or something like that. So when you stick an Ubuntu disk in and do a default installation, everything you get is "part of the operating system". Some might even go as far as to say it includes everything that can be installed through the default package servers.
But if you really want to get into it, it can be a little bit more subtle than that. For example, if HP builds on top of Ubuntu but changes some of the packages, is it still Ubuntu? What HP completely rewrote Gnome and X.org, but their Gnome/X.org replacements are GPL and maintain full application compatibility with Ubuntu? Is it still Ubuntu then? Does it change the situation if HP wrote a proprietary replacement for Gnome/X.org, but still maintained application compatibility? Would it still be Ubuntu? Would it still be Linux?
I don't think those questions are all that easy to answer. Whether they could keep the Ubuntu branding would largely be a legal issue of whether Canonical allowed it. If HP tried to replace X.org with something proprietary, whether or not it's still "Linux" (or legal), you'd have a lot of pissed off people.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to me to see, if a lot of OEMs start shipping with Linux, exactly how much customization they do. Realistically, they could just work with a given distribution to make sure their hardware is well-supported, and then install the normal/vanilla install of that distribution, but they could also effectively roll their own distro. It could get interesting (but unfortunately probably won't).
Yeah, I've sort of been waiting for this. It makes a lot of sense to me that OEMs would want their pre-installed OS to be something that they could control completely, even if they don't technically "own" it.
Once upon a time, every computer company came out with their own hardware and software package. You had Apple, IBM, Commodore, etc. Some of the reason that everyone came out with their own software was because they weren't allowed to just take each others' software, but some of it was also that they each had different ideas about what was important.
That model fell apart because it was too expensive for everyone to develop everything themselves from scratch, and also because it was too annoying to deal with all the incompatibilities. However, by turning to Microsoft as an alternate solution, everyone sacrificed a lot of power and control over their own products.
Now that there are credible FOSS operating systems just sitting around waiting to be used, the problems of "starting from scratch" and "dealing with incompatibilities" are pretty much gone. If I were running Dell or HP, I would have had people working on custom/rebranded Linux or BSD distributions for several years already, including packaging systems and servers that would allow my company to control updates too.
I'm surprised more companies haven't done this, actually.
It's not that surprising when you consider that Microsoft has made a practice or retaliating against OEMs who sell non-MS systems. I don't have good citations here, but I remember reading that Microsoft used to put things in their deals like, "If you advertise or openly sell non-MS desktop systems, we'll raise the cost of your OEM versions of Windows $X per copy." Even if X is a pretty small number, it can add up to be a lot of money for big OEMs.
Apple is a bit different in that they have a proprietary OS that they license only for specific hardware (isn't that still the way it is? or no? I could be behind the times here).
Not exactly-- really it depends a bit on what you consider the "OS" to be. The underlying OS is open source, and "free" in the FSF sense. The graphical layer that runs on top is proprietary and only licensed to be installed on Apple hardware. You can take their OS and replace the graphical layer with X11 and Gnome, and the whole thing runs.
Now a lot of people would say this is splitting hairs, saying that since you can't run OSX apps on a "free" system, you can't say the OS in "free". It's a valid objection. However, I still think it's noteworthy that code for the kernel and lots of other stuff is available to developer to look at and copy.
I also just generally dislike the "I'm cool, I have an Apple. I'm artsy. PC users automatically get -5 points for using a PC even if their [music, art, web design] is great."
Me too, I guess, insofar as there are Apple users who act that way. I don't let it stop me from using a Mac when it happens to be the best tool for the job (which sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't). Also, lots of Mac users aren't really like that. A fair amount these days are normal computer geeks who just happen to want a Unix system that is also formally supported by Photoshop (or some similar needs).
But really, we're straying off course a bit here.
I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency unless you're doing things that *I* might find common, which is not Joe User.
I can believe that a properly engineered OS would prompt that frequently, assuming enough improperly engineered applications. And there are plenty of crappy Windows apps floating out there to make this thing believable.
It's my business where I install the OS. It will only be on one computer at a time, but if I pay the money, the OS goes where I decide when it suits me to reinstall, without a penalty to ME.
I agree completely. I always get modded as a troll, but forced activation really is one of the things that keeps me from using Windows Vista. Every product that I've used that has activation has, at some point or another, made it needlessly difficult for me to do something legitimate. I just refuse to deal with that stuff anymore.
I have enough problems with software working properly without the developers embedding kill-switches in their software.
Oh, it's terrible for consumers. First, not auctioning off this spectrum deprives tax payers of money. When you think about it, it's really criminal that the government doesn't auction off all of our services and rights to private enterprise. We could make SO MUCH money!
Also, by providing "free" things, you're depriving companies of revenue, which will damage the economy. They'll have to charge more for other services, and probably cut jobs too. We want the telecoms to make as much money as possible, because then the economy will thrive.
(Of course I'm not serious, but apparently some people think like this.)
Here's what kind of annoys me, though: why should I have to install add-ons to remove functionality that I don't ever really want?
Honestly, there might be one or two websites that I use that use pop-up windows for valid reasons, but I'm sure that if that avenue were shut to them, they could easily make the page work without pop-ups. Why can't browsers just not allow a web page to open a new window? Or if you must, make it so new windows can only be opened in response to an actual click, only allow one window to be opened by that click, and make it so that one click can't also change the contents of the existing window in addition to opening a new window.
I just don't see lots of valid uses for letting scripts open windows in the first place.
I know it's not supposed to be a stamp of authoritative correctness. That was my point, that (some) people incorrectly treat it as one.
Yeah, I acknowledge that my concern shouldn't really be the primary concern. There's a reason I wanted to call it a "weird" objection.
I just think it is possible to put too much faith in peer review, given that the "peers" reviewing it are also human beings, just as fallible as other human beings. Computers are arguably less fallible in other ways, but of course they can't really make judgements. So I'm just really trying to point out that, in the other cases where we mix fallible human beings with machine judgement, we tend to get very powerful systems that can work well in some ways, but we also tend to end up with important things getting lost in the shuffle.
I used the example of a spam filter. My Gmail spam filter still lets some spam through, and gets occasional false-positives. Still, I use it, and I'd hate to have to filter through all that spam myself.
I'm sometimes bothered by the stress on studies being "verified" by something like a peer-review process. Not that I don't understand why it makes sense. It's a pretty reasonable attempt to sort valid work from crap, but...
There's still a certain way in which it's just an appeal to authority. It's people saying, "We should accept what this scientist says because other scientists say that he's right." I guess what I'm saying is that I worry that, as a process like this becomes more technical, people will be more likely to confuse a statement like, "This study has been reviewed by other scientists and seems to have merit," with something more like, "This study is correct, infallible, and indisputable."
And I guess part of the reason I worry about this is that there may be cases where what "everyone thinks" (i.e. the common conception even among experts) is wrong, and some random nutcase is right. It almost never happens, but it happens sometimes. It seems to me that a technical method of assigning trustworthiness of ideas in a web of trust might possibly lead to having all the groundbreaking ideas go into a spam filter somewhere, never to be seen again.
I didn't LOL, but maybe it's just because I've been reading Internet posts too much. After a while, you realize that you can't assume anything is a joke, no matter how absurd.
So to rephrase your analogy as I see the situation, it would be if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then at the dealership they stripped off the leather and replaced it with canvas (or whatever), and put in a crappy stereo using the excuse that only audiophiles really need nice stereos.
I think the analogy has to get weirder than that. It would be like if Nissan built all Maximas with leather seats and Bose stereos, but then hacked the stereos to limit the volume to a low level and put some device on the engine that wouldn't let you go over 35mph, and sell that for a cheaper price.
You could easily argue that Nissan has the right to do that, but it would seem silly, and I'd expect consumers to either refuse to buy them, or else buy them and then hack them to make the cars fully functional.
Yeah, as a Linux user, it's nice not to have things so complicated. I only have to choose between Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, and-
In every story I've seen about Microsoft releasing tons of versions of Windows, there are always comments that amount to, "Yeah, but there are tons of different Linux distributions!"
The problem with this criticism is that it's not at all the same thing. Each Linux distribution is an entirely different company (or group) putting out their own operating system. These operating systems are competitors. If you ignore the fact that they're all based on the same kernel, they're just different vendors selling different operating systems.
So what are you trying to criticize here? Are you trying to criticize Redhat because Canonical released Ubuntu?
The Microsoft situation is that it's one vendor selling several different versions of the same operating system. Whether or not you think that's a good thing, it's a single company releasing multiple subtly different products for the purpose of market segmentation, as opposed to multiple companies releasing competing products.
I might be prone to hyperbole, but I don't think that particular post is actually exaggerated. I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was leaked somewhere around 2000 that Apple was working on a phone, which is why there were constant rumors for years that it was slated for immanent release. Jobs later confirmed that they'd been working on it for a long time, but didn't want to release it until the technology got good enough.
So no, it was definitely not some product that was thrown together hastily in a short amount of time. As far as iChat, I also disagree there. When they first added video capabilities, I could almost never get a connection. In the most recent versions, though, it seems to work great. If someone has a slow uplink, the picture might look pretty bad, but it generally works.